GEOLOGY OF THE WHITE MOUNTAIN DISTRICT. I99 



near by, the foot-hills, and elsewhere the trees and the swelling hills 

 that form the foreground of his picture ; but here, as we ride along, the 

 changes are so rapid that we have these combinations in a single picture. 



The swelling undulations of the gneiss ; the pyramidal hills of por- 

 phyrite, broken by dizzy precipices ; the rolling hills of the siliceous and 

 chloritic schists, the vertical strata of which have been worn and torn 

 and ground by the glaciers of the great ice age ; the mountains of gran- 

 ite, that have been crumbling by slow degrees through the ages ; and, 

 finally, the mica schist and gneiss of the White Mountains, that have the 

 strata crumpled and contorted by a thousand foldings, and here form 

 bold, projecting points and sudden recesses, that break the mass into 

 such picturesque wildness, — all form not so much a single picture, per- 

 haps, as a general panorama, each view of which has some point of 

 beauty which seems to excel all the others. 



Bluff mountain, directly north of Island Pond, is mica schist. The 

 rocks, left bare by the fires that have swept the vegetation from its sum- 

 mit, show a reddish tinge, and point to the fact that they are ferruginous. 

 These rocks are cut by the railway north-west of the village, where they 

 have an easterly dip. 



At the village near the station there are huge moraines, made up for 

 the most part of very coarse material derived chiefly from granitic rocks, 

 probably those in Morgan and Norton. East of the village we come to 

 an outcrop of a peculiar granite, probably intrusive. The quartz which 

 very largely predominates is gray and vitreous. The mica is a rusty 

 brown or black; the feldspar, when found, is dark and triclinic. This 

 rock extends ten miles east of Island Pond, Near its eastern limit, at 

 Nulhegan station, there is in this rock a bed of very fine-grained granite. 

 It is quarried to some extent, and is used along the line of the railway. 



After crossing the Nulhegan river, going east, we find a kind of sand- 

 stone schist, often thick bedded, but elsewhere foliated and micaceous, 

 passing into mica schist. This rock is not cut by the railway, but is 

 found to the north along the carriage-road ; while to the south of the 

 railway we find the White Mountain gneisses. Along the Connecticut, 

 in the vicinity of North Stratford, we find mica schists with strata nearly 

 vertical, but with varying strike. In this rock, west of the river, there is 

 a variety of andalusite somewhat rare. It occurs in crystals of a reddish- 



